Empathy theory

The empathy theory - also called resonance theory or detection theory - describes a theory developed in German-speaking countries around the turn of the 20th century , which believed to have found the key to aesthetics in the individual psychological process of empathy . Its foundations go back to the 18th century.

The development of the term “empathy” in the context of aesthetics

The introduction of the term into psychological and aesthetic methodology mainly served the purpose of defining the boundaries between sensual and aesthetic enjoyment more precisely. The corresponding efforts formed an important moment in the process of establishing aesthetics as an independent science, with the analysis of aesthetic experience becoming a main theme. While the closeness to experimental psychology promised the strictest scientific approach, research into the conditions of aesthetic enjoyment based on certain premises resulted in a historically relativized aesthetic behavior being theoretically absolutized and preserved.

The concept of empathy, developed by the old Hegelian Friedrich Theodor Vischer and his son Robert Vischer to the term technicus , referred to in the sense of empathy theory a psychological act through which external sensual phenomena were filled with spiritual content. The perceiver's own experience was projected into the objects as experienced in their life or felt into the foreign body. This act of inspiration was considered the basis of aesthetic enjoyment. The entire empathy literature was based on this train of thought. The term was applied by its representatives to dead objects as well as to living people and literary figures, so that very different contents were associated with it. The question was raised only hesitantly whether the animation of nature and the animation of the human body could even be placed on the same level.

To the three determining empathy concepts

An answer that made it possible to understand the changing manifestations of empathy in its social conditions and functions could not be provided from this point of view. The empathetic esthete - a word formation created in 1894 - could not get any clarity about the historical starting point of their subject. Within the existing forms of thinking, three distinguishable empathy concepts can be described:

Enlightenment theatrical empathy theory

Idea of the animation of nature in its development from deism to romanticism

Empathy theory of German neo-Kantianism

The 1st empathy concept

In substance and in concept, "empathy" is an achievement of enlightenment and sensitivity . In connection with a style change, in the course of which the heroic genres epic and tragedy were displaced by bourgeois drama and the novel , empathy had been worked out by the theorists of drama as a new aesthetic basis for theater events and then became constitutive for the entire understanding of literature.

Historically, the ideology of empathy replaces the ideology of imitation of nature ( mimesis ), which was undisputed until the middle of the 18th century. From the point of view of empathetic aesthetes, imitation of nature remains external on the one hand and is not always possible on the other. A thunderstorm can not be reproduced authentically with the best stage machinery . The sensations produced by the thunderstorm can, however, arise through suitable poetic or musical means.

In 1767, Pierre de Beaumarchais defined empathy in the theater as "a spontaneous emotion through which we make this happening our own, a feeling that puts us in the place of the suffering, in the middle of his situation". It was based on a view that theater understood as a model for the changing effects of a changed milieu on people. Here, too, the viewer was changed against his will, in so far as he, infected with the bacillus of sympathy for the needs of his own kind, left the theater. The spontaneous act of identification with the suffering hero revealed, it was believed, to the viewer his better self, which could not be denied again in everyday life.

A prerequisite was the sensibilité ( "sensitivity") as about Jean-Baptiste Dubos had formulated. With it religious beliefs were freed from the authority of the church. Essential for this empathy concept, to which, with the exception of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , all major aesthetic program publications of the time from Denis Diderot to Friedrich Schiller , was the historical-philosophical legitimation that Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave to pity in the price publication on inequality ( 1755 ): “Undoubtedly, the more the watching being is able to put itself in the position of the sufferer, the stronger the compassion must be. It is certain that this empathy with the state of nature was infinitely deeper than in a time when people are used to thinking. ”By expressly relating theatrical identification with this conception, the theater became the last refuge of the state of nature in the Civilization, the only place where, within a depraved social order, there was still room for compassion as the “original feeling of humanity”. A popular time of publication was the melodrama of the rococo .

The generic term “ bourgeois drama ” refers to the social contexts in which this concept of identification or empathy was rooted in the Enlightenment . In the understanding of contemporaries, it expressed the abandonment of the representation of state action and the public sphere in favor of events in the sphere of everyday bourgeoisie. By orienting itself towards events outside the public sphere of the absolutist state , the bourgeois drama reflected and promoted the dissolution of the political classes of the old order into the social differences of the new bourgeois society .

Empathy forms the correlate on the level of reception to this progressive historical tendency towards privatization in representation . Made possible by the equivalence between the audience and the dramatic staff, it was the function of this empathy to disempower the prevailing conditions through aesthetic egalitarianism . By being able to demonstrate the "equality of human feeling under every shell", the theater united the representatives of all classes on the idea of one general human nature. In this respect, the act of theatrical empathy in the 18th century is both aesthetic and political in nature.

The 2nd empathy concept

However, it was not the Enlightenment's concept of empathy that became immediately important for the development of empathy theory, but rather the aesthetic discovery of nature and the ensouling of things by the poets, which reached a climax in Romanticism . Inspiration was no longer a divine privilege, but something humanly possible, and this was tried to be justified as follows: Like the development of the human senses, the poetic conception of nature, the "poetization" of the world, is a result of history. The primitive reflection of early human times, it was believed, had understood the puzzling phenomena of nature as the animated nature of things. An animation of things by the poets had a stage of development as a prerequisite, in which the feeling of human powerlessness gave way to an overpowering nature and social rule over it appeared secure. The sublime lost its horror. Mankind acquired the freedom to enjoy nature at the point in time when the forces of nature could become the object of science and thus of technical use.

The social barriers, however, had the effect that the history of the feeling for nature and the history of humanized nature were not identical. The human being does not only achieve his universality by penetrating nature through knowledge and tools, it also had to assert himself against the spiritual barriers in society. In this respect, the poeticization of the world , which has developed since the Renaissance, had a double function: It raised awareness of new areas of nature and deified nature by understanding the knowledge of the world as a true knowledge of God. Not only pantheism , but also deism with its finalistic belief "Creation praises the Creator" were closely related to this development.

It was only Schiller's gods of Greece who broke with this tradition and brought out the anti-Christian consequences that followed from deism with sharpness by contrasting the Christian worldview with the mythological of antiquity . In this way, Schiller saw a “de-goded world” as the result of Newton's view of the world, but sought to overcome the condition that left the poet “only the de-soulled word” by returning to the “beautiful world” of antiquity. In contrast, the spiritualistic-philosophical pantheism of the early Romantics meant , from an aesthetic point of view, the regaining of poetic power for the poetic word, from a philosophical point of view it was a clinging to an anthropomorphic meaning of life anchored in the universe, which assumed universal harmony in nature and society.

It corresponded to this worldview if, according to the romantic view, the poet was given a special medium of sensation, which in a mystical way opened up access to the soul of nature and its manifestations. Increasing reification, however, ultimately made pantheism unusable ( Heinrich Heine ) and moved nature and landscape remote from humans to a level of transcendence that was only accessible to experience. The theory of empathy never got beyond the horizon of the romantic feeling for nature. Without knowledge of the aesthetic discussions of the 18th century, she dogmatized empathy for the transitive expansion of the ego, while for the Enlighteners the focus on identification was precisely the communicative process of action-oriented, i.e., personality-expanding and norming experience.

The 3rd empathy concept

A comprehensive theory of empathy - inspired by F. Th. Vischer's work Das Symbol ( 1887 ) - was presented by Theodor Lipps in his work Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst ( 1906 ). The epistemological question of how the consciousness of strangers would be achieved was decisive for Lipps' considerations. In this context, a particular problem was the question of the psychological mechanism, how the psychic represented in the work of art presented itself to the recipient. According to Lipps, it is the peculiar function of empathy, which he regarded as a fact that cannot be traced back further, to objectify the ego known only from its own experience and feeling. The foreign I's are the reproductions of one's own ego, which empathizes its feelings with the foreign body. The subjective idealism recognizable here also formed the philosophical basis for Lipp's theory of aesthetic reception.

By permanently observing the phenomena of empathy in their individual and therefore abstract form, the proponents of empathy theory based them on a specific presupposition of philosophy. How largely Lipps in particular was determined by the agnostic epistemology of the ruling Neo-Kantianism was most clearly shown by his interpretation of the inspiration of nature: “So I find the one undivided I in the thing. I find myself in the thing , encompassing and encompassing the manifold of it ”. Not only the doing and suffering of natural things were thus traced back to empathy, but also the existence of things themselves.

The empathy theory achieved widespread impact, which continues to have an impact up to the present day, especially in aesthetics and art history in Germany before the First World War . Even works that are critical of Lipps and his absolutization of empathy as the sole source of aesthetic enjoyment, such as Wilhelm Worringer's in Abstraction and Empathy ( 1906 ), since they worked with abstract counter-terms, only caused a further dehistoricization of the empathy theory.

literature

Christian G. Allesch: Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. utb, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-8252-2773-1 .
Erich Everth : Volkelt's basic aesthetic figures. Eduard Pfeiffer, Leipzig 1926
Karl Groos : The aesthetic pleasure. Giessen 1902
Edith Stein : On the problem of empathy. (Diss.), Munich 1980 (reprint of the 1917 edition).
Johannes Volkelt : System of Aesthetics. Munich 1905
Stephan Witasek : Basics of general aesthetics. Leipzig 1904
Theobald Ziegler: On the Genesis of an Aesthetic Concept. In: Journal for Comparative Literature History , 7 (1894), p. 113ff.